Where the numbers come from
We request the public inventory pages a dealer publishes on their own website, the same pages anyone can open in a browser, and we read the text that comes back. We do not use dealer management software, private feeds, or anything a dealer sends us. We have not inspected any vehicle.
What “listings we could read” counts
The number of vehicle listings our reader took off those pages at the time shown on the dealer's page. It is a count of listings, not of machines. A dealer can have units on the floor that never appear online, and can have listings online for units that are not on the floor.
If part of a site's inventory is published in a way our reader does not follow, those listings are not in the count, and in most cases we would have no way to know they were missing. Treat the count as a floor.
“Carried a VIN or a stock number”
We count a listing that way when the page carried a full seventeen character VIN, or a stock number that was not one of the placeholder values sites use to mean nothing here, such as a dash, N/A, TBD or CALL. We count a listing the other way when we found neither.
This is a statement about the text of a listing and nothing else. A machine can be standing on the floor and still be listed without an identifier. A listing can carry an identifier and be sold by the time you arrive.
Listings that look like factory orders
Where a listing published no VIN, no stock number, no price and no colour, we count it separately, because that is how a model you order from the factory normally appears. Advertising models you can order is a normal and legitimate thing for a dealer to do.
That is our classification, made from the fields present on the page. It is not a label the dealer applied, and we could be wrong about any individual listing. The dealer's own page is the thing to check.
The oldest listing date
The earliest listing date the dealer themselves published, across their current listings, counted in days to today. We do not substitute the date we first read a listing. Doing so would have printed our own start date as a fact about their inventory: a dealer whose website publishes no dates, read for the first time today, would have shown nought days.
So where a dealer's website publishes no listing dates, we show no figure at all rather than a small one. That is common — one widely used dealer website platform publishes no listing date anywhere, and it accounts for most of the dealers we read.
It remains a floor rather than a ceiling. If a listing is taken down and put back up, its published date starts again, and our number drops with it. We are building a record of the machines we have seen before so that a restarted date can be recognised as one, but that record only becomes useful with time, and we would rather understate a figure than overstate one about somebody's business.
Wording about charges
Separately from the inventory count, we fetch one page per dealer, their combined inventory listing page, and search its source for a short list of words. We record whether each one occurred. That is the whole of it.
| Check | Words we look for |
|---|---|
| Assembly or setup | assembly, set-up fee, prep fee, uncrate |
| Freight or destination | freight, destination charge |
| Documentary fee | doc fee, document fee, documentary fee, documentation fee |
| Reconditioning | reconditioning, shop fee, certification fee |
| Fees in general | dealer fee, dealer charges, additional fees, other fees |
| Price qualifier | price does not, price excludes, plus tax, plus fees, plus freight, out the door |
A page that contains the word “doc fee” is not necessarily telling you the amount, or telling you it applies to you. A page that does not contain it may still set out charges elsewhere on the site, on a window sticker, or on the buyer's order. We looked at one page. We did not read the rest of the website, and we did not read anybody's paperwork.
Price changes we watched
Each time we re-read a listing we compare the asking price with the one we recorded last time. When it differs, we write down both numbers and the date. That is the whole method, and its limit is the important part: we can only speak to changes that happened between two of our own reads. Every listing page names the date we started watching it, and nothing on this site says a price has never moved — only that we have seen no change since a date we name.
A listing that stops showing a number and starts saying “call for price” is recorded as the price being withdrawn, and it is shown separately from a price change. It is not a discount and we never count it as one. This matters more than it sounds: of the price events in our records, most are a page adding or removing a number rather than changing it, and treating those as price cuts would say something false about a named business.
Comparing one machine against others
Where at least five separate dealers list the same year, make and model, we show the middle asking price across them and where this one sits against it. Below five dealers we show nothing at all, because a middle price drawn from three listings that happen to disagree reads as authoritative and is not.
Two things this is not. These are asking prices published on dealer websites, not transaction prices — nobody outside the deal knows what a machine sold for, and we make no claim about it. And we never compare used machines, because price there turns on mileage, damage and service history that we do not hold; a percentage against the market on a used bike would be a confident number with nothing behind it.
Trim levels are kept apart on purpose. A Tuono V4 and a Tuono V4 Factory differ by thousands of dollars, and merging them would produce a middle price that is wrong for both and would make an honest dealer look like they were overcharging.
“Not measured” is not “not found”
These two never mean the same thing and never appear together on a dealer page. No occurrence found means we ran the check and the word was not on the page we read. Not measured means we did not run that check for that dealer, so we have nothing to report. The second is a gap in our work and is never a mark against a dealer.
How often we look
We re-read dealers on a rolling schedule rather than all at once, so two dealers on this site can be carrying figures from different days. That is why the date sits beside the figures on every page rather than once in a footer. Nothing here is live.
What we do not do
- We do not rank, score or grade dealers, and there is no league table.
- We do not publish photographs from dealer listings.
- We do not take money from dealers, in any form, for anything.
- We do not contact a dealer for comment before publishing a count, because a count of their own public pages is not an allegation for them to answer.
- We do not check any of these listings against a dealer's own records. Those are private, and we have never seen one.
Where this can be wrong
Our reader can misread a page. Websites change their layout, and a change can make a count wrong until we notice. A dealer can fix something the day after we look, and our figure will be stale until we read them again. We publish the date beside every figure so that you can weigh it.
If a number here is wrong, tell us and we will look at it. Corrections are free, and there is no version of this site where they are not.